studiVZ and meinVZ sites are from now on part of the "People Search" search engine. In the near future further work will be done in order to achieve better accuracy for the search results of both sites!

I will try to keep this article sort... I would like to hear you opinion about SFF add-on. Till now there aren't any comments on Mozilla's site about it. So your opinion would be valuable and would guide me to continue development to the right direction. Suggestions for new features are really important for me!

You can use sffaddon.com new forum to post your suggestions and specifically the "User suggestions" forum. No registration is required! You can post as a guest but feel free to sign-up if you want.

A new forum is now online for support requests and new features suggestions! You can access it from the top menu or visit it here. No registration is required in order to post new messages and that applies to both forums, but feel free to register if you want!

A couple days ago I added Twitter to "People Search" page. That was the first step of the many that will follow in the update process.

The goal is to include every site that can be searched via the add-on's chrome interface (e.g. iframe results presentation) to "People Search" search engine and vice versa. So at the end of that process all sites must be included in both add-on's results presentation system and "People Search" page, with maybe the exception of some sites that as I have already explained in "SFF's user interface" article is difficult to be included in the add-on's main interface. I'm thinking of some ways to overcome these difficulties, but they might not work for all sites, so there may be some sites that will be available only through "People Search" page even after the update. As the custom search engine can be updated independently, changes have already started, but changes that mentioned above regarding the add-on itself will be presented when a new major version of the add-on will be released.

Beside the addition of new sites to "People Search", I'm updating search engine's URL patterns in order to optimize the effectiveness of the searches. Because I haven't found any documentation for the URLs structure of the sites that I'm including in the search engine I have to observe these patterns myself and that takes some effort and time and that's why I'm not adding all sites at once. Anyway, this refinement will always be going on and the aim is more accurate and complete results!

Version 1.2 is now publicly available after its full review from the AMO Editors. The update utilizes the toolbar palette in order to make the addon compatible with future Firefox versions. The full list of the changes can be found in this changelog.

It has been more than a year since SFF's previous update. Hopefully, from now on the updates will be more often, offering compatibility updates for future Firefox versions, bug fixes and new features!

If you use SFF you'll notice that for some site's (Facebook, hi5, MySpace, Twitter, Google Profiles, diigo, Plurk and brightkite) results can be presented in three different ways:

in a single chrome page within iframes with colorful borders and navigation capabilities for the sites in the iframes

in a single chrome page with icons that link to the site's results page and a beautiful photo of Seattle's skyline at dusk as a background

and lastly in separate tabs, one for each site

Users can define which method of presentation they want, for each site mentioned above, explicitly via the addon's Options window.

But there are sites (LinkedIn, blogspot, vkontakte, bebo, Netlog) for which there aren't any presentation options available. The search is done with the help of a Google Custom Search Engine that is appropriatelyparameterized for the addon's needs.

These two groups of sites with the different presentation handling they likely raise the question why there is that kind of distinction. The answer is that some sites, as LinkedIn for example, use different fields for the name and the surname in the query string and that may cause a search return no results. Lets say that you encounter somewhere the string "John Doe" you highlight it and click "Search social networks". SFF would broke the string in two tokens, "John" and "Doe", and would pass these values to the query string's fields. Then the results would appear. But if you encounter somewhere the string "Doe John" the tokens would be passed to the URL fields name and surname in the wrong order and that would cause a search attempt with no results. Of course it is possible to use two iframes / icons / tabs (depending on the presentation method) for these sites and do a search with both the combinations of the tokens, but that can not be considered as a solution for me. It is not elegant.

Furthermore there are sites, e.g. Netlog, that do not allow name searches for not logged in users, but only general ones. So for sites of these categories there isn't an obvious and quick solution.

During the last month site's load time was moderate because the hosting provider was upgrading its servers. Upgrade process hasn't finished yet (although now it may be close to the end), but now things seem much better!

I changed the URL of the addon's listing on AMO from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/social-friend-finder/ to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/sff/ in order to reflect the shortened version of the addon's name (SFF). Also I added the shortened name to page's title.